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Opera has released a beta of its latest desktop browser for Linux and FreeBSD.

Opera 10.53 beta for Linux and FreeBSD is the first Unix beta of Evenes, the browser built atop the company's new Carakan JavaScript engine. "If you've been waiting [for] Opera 10.5 to stabilize before trying it on your Linux or FreeBSD system, now is your chance," writes Opera's Arjan van Leeuwen in a blog post.

Evenes also offers Opera's new Vega graphics engine and support for HTML5 video via the free and open Ogg Theora codec.

With the new Linux and FreeBSD beta, Opera has dropped its dependency on Trolltech's Qt toolkit, the same toolkit used by KDE, in favor of a toolkit-agnostic setup. According to the company, the browser now fits better with GTK-based environments such as Xfce and Gnome. Opera has also changed its end-user licensing agreement as "part of an effort from Opera to make it easier to distribute [the browser] in the package repositories of various open source operating systems."

Whither Solaris support? It's not coming. "In order to ensure a consistently high quality browser across our most popular desktop platforms we have reluctantly decided to drop support for Solaris," reads a post from Ruari Ødegaard.

"This will allow our UNIX development team to focus all of their attention on bringing Opera for Linux and FreeBSD up to final release quality."